SOURCE: "Shock Treatment," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 16, October 8, 1992, pp. 35-9.

In the following essay, Kerr presents an overview of Cela's life and major works, and traces his relationship to the political and cultural climate in Spain.

After the death of General Franco, King Juan Carlos appointed the novelist Camilo José Cela to Spain's Parliament and asked him to help oversee the literary style of the new democratic constitution. Cela remembers a Senate vote in which he managed to avoid taking a position with the same steadfast, principled evasion that has been a theme in his fiction: "President Fontan said, 'Senator Cela, you vote neither yes nor no, and you don't abstain?' I stood and said respectfully, 'No, Mr. President, I am absent.'"

Cela was in his sixties at the time, just beginning to be recognized as an old statesman of Spanish...